


Così fan tutte

by zetaophiuchi (ryuujitsu)



Category: SKAM (France)
Genre: 75 Dates In The Skam Universe, Bi-Pan Solidarity, Biphobia, Bisexuality, Black Tie, Character Study, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Future Fic, Internalized Misogyny, M/M, Operas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-09-28 01:54:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20417942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryuujitsu/pseuds/zetaophiuchi
Summary: Lucille goes to the opera. It’s another double date.





	1. Overture / September

**Author's Note:**

> "The full title is Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti: 'Thus do they all [ie women], or The School for Lovers' but the shortened form is usually 'They’re all like that' or 'All women behave the same.' This slipperiness suits a work known for being cynical about love yet which has wonderful love-music..." —The Telegraph, "[The opera novice: Mozart's Così fan tutte](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/opera/9087354/The-opera-novice-Mozarts-Cosi-fan-tutte.html)" (February 17, 2012)
> 
>   * Lucille doesn’t get enough love! Those are my feelings and also kind of the summary for this fic.
>   * My own personal headcanon is that Lucille and Eliott have known each other since they were pre-teens and have grown up together and know practically all each other’s secrets.
>   * This is set in the same universe as [so are you to my thoughts as food to life.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18822283/chapters/44664283)

Lucille likes beautiful people. Blondes, usually; she loves blondes. The paler and more translucent the better. She’s had posters of Yvette Mimieux and Jeanne Moreau on her door since forever. 

She liked Eliott before he was beautiful, though, when he was just the boy next door, the idiot boy with knees scraped from falling off his skateboard, when his voice was still cracking and they would meet in the hallway of their apartment building to complain about their parents and share the faddish blemish treatments they’d searched for online.

Their first kiss happened after a yogurt mask. They’d gone to wash it off in her father's kitchen, and afterward with her fingers still on the tap and yogurt on her chin she’d pressed her mouth to his. She still remembers how soft his lips were, the smoothness of his cheek, how fast her heart was beating. She kissed him so slowly, holding her breath, waiting for him to flinch away.

He kissed her back instead. Afterward, they stood by the windowsill, and Eliott took her hands and squeezed them. The look in his eyes was worshipful and dazed; she’s never forgotten it.

He said, “I thought you liked girls.”

“I do,” she said. “I like you too. You’re special.”

He stays special, even after he becomes beautiful and spotless and breaks her heart so many times it still feels fractured, and she can’t stay away. When Eliott’s sleeping off his péniche adventure on Lucas’ couch, she goes to the Demaurys’ for their usual Sunday dinner and cries into the cassoulet while Mme. Demaury rubs her back. She comes back the next Sunday, too, when Eliott is there, and they talk about school, they talk about Marivaux, and the silences are awkward and M. Demaury’s looks at Eliott are numerous and pointed and dismayed, but they get through it. After that, it’s easier. Three months later, they’re all at the table: the Demaurys, herself, Eliott, and Lucas, poor nervous Lucas, whose hands shake when he tries to pass the bread.

Time passes. Lucille moves on. She starts university, she studies, she travels. She drinks, she dances. She kisses boys and girls at parties, and that’s how she meets Sander, who she dates for three months, until he has to go back to Norway. They promise to keep in touch; they don’t.

“Are you seeing anyone, dear?” Mme. Demaury asks, unfailingly, every Sunday, and every Sunday Lucille answers with a rueful smile.

In September of 2022, her last year at Paris II, she steps into the old oak-paneled classroom of her human rights seminar and sees Chloé.

She’s always liked the way Chloé dressed, like a blackbird, with accents of subtle blue and purple like the sun on a blackbird’s wing. Her style hasn’t changed much from her lycée days: she still wears bangs, she still has that black pom-pom on her bag. Today, she looks unusually demure: she’s in stripes, the Peter Pan collar of her cream-and-black blouse tied with a little velvet bow.

She remembers suddenly how she and Eliott used to stroll around the neighborhood and look at girls together. _Her, over there, with the red hair, she’s cute_. _Why don’t you go talk to her? No, you. _He hadn’t wanted to play that game with Chloé; he’d been sullen and silent and withdrawn. _She’s fine, I guess,_ he’d said. She should have known then. She should have realized that things were changing.

Chloé’s never been her type. She’s small, for one, and too cute, with enormous melting eyes, like Eliott’s fluffy-headed hedgehog of a boyfriend.

But today, at nine a.m. on the ninth of September, Lucille wants to hold her hand anyway, and kiss her mouth, and pull her dark hair.

She wonders if Chloé remembers her. She settles for a quick smile and a “Hi” as she chooses her seat on the opposite end of the table.

Chloé looks up from her phone, smiling, and then her smile seems to jolt, and her eyes widen, and she says, “Lucille?”

“You remember,” Lucille says. She means to say, _You remember me_, but her voice trails off. She thinks about the last time she saw Chloé, furious in the dim light of the Demaurys’ apartment, her small hands clenched.

_He’s handsome, but he treats you badly,_ Chloé said, _he’s handsome, but you can’t let him talk to you like that._

Lucille had made some placating sounds. She’d said, worldly-wise, tired, thinking of Idriss, “I’m used to it, really.” She’d thought to herself, _You’re just a child. You don’t understand the way Eliott and I love each other. We have an arrangement._

_You deserve better,_ Chloé said, and, _God, I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s gotten into me._

“What a small world,” Chloé says. She smiles again, and this time she looks pleased, her dark eyes crinkling.

Hurriedly, Lucille takes a sip of her coffee. She burns her mouth.

Her tongue still feels scalded two days later, when she asks Eliott, “Does Lucas still keep in touch with Chloé, do you know?”

They’re preparing a salad in the Demaury kitchen, to accompany the tagine. Lucille shreds cabbage leaves while Eliott rinses carrots.

“Who?” Eliott says. Then his brow clears. “Oh,” he says. “Her.”

She’s amused by the sudden flintiness of his gaze, the overt jealousy. _It’s been years, Eliott_, she wants to say. _Relax. Your hedgehog didn’t even like her, not really. Rest assured, you’ve always been number one in his heart. _

“I have no idea,” Eliott says, glancing at her smile in perplexity. Some of the coldness leaves his eyes. “Why don’t you just ask Lucas? _Choupi_,” he starts to call toward the dining room, where Lucas and Mme. Demaury are listening to some Paganini.

“It’s okay,” she says hastily, “I was just wondering, I don’t really need to know.”

But Lucas sticks his head in the doorway. These days he wears his hair long, and loose, too, falling over his eyes: the uniform of the engineering student, along with an oversized flannel. She knows Eliott finds it irresistible; out of the corner of her eye, she sees him swallowing.

“Yeah?” Lucas says. “What is it, babe?”

If she’s being honest, she envies the pet names. When they first started dating, Eliott used to call her Lucy; he stopped when they entered lycée, saying the sounds were too similar. _And I don’t like school, but I like you, _was his childish reason. They’d done away with pet names altogether, telling each other they were too mature, too grown-up, for _cabbage _and _babe _and _sweetie. _Now, the only nicknames in her life are from her roommate Claudine, who uses her initials, and her latest, youngest step-mother, who, in trying to force familiarity, has taken to calling her Lulu. It drives her crazy.

“Do you still talk to Chloé?” Eliott asks, before Lucille can stop him.

Lucas blinks. “No,” he says. “Why would I?”

“Wasn’t she dating Yann for a while?” Eliott says, and Lucille tries to digest this information, tries to remember who Yann is and what Yann is like. The best friend, she recalls finally, tall, male, good-natured, and a dim memory resurfaces of a dark handsome face and large hands and rugby stripes.

“Bah, no,” Lucas says, waving a hand, “that lasted, like, two months. That was over long ago. No,” he says, shrugging, “I haven’t seen her since we graduated. No idea what she’s up to. Why?”

“Lucille was—” she elbows Eliott, jostling his arm “—ah, my carrots!”

She knocks the strainer from his grasp; the carrots tumble into the sink amid discarded peelings. Eliott scrambles to retrieve them, and Lucille dries her hands on a towel and goes to join Mme. Demaury by the stereo.

Lucas looks at her a little suspiciously as she passes, but that’s nothing unusual. He’s always looking suspiciously at everything. She envisions Lucas as a Pomeranian sometimes, small and fierce and yappy, ready to attack every enemy ankle that dares to stray into his territory; it makes her laugh.

She hears a wet noise as she exits and turns back in time to see Eliott folding both arms around Lucas’ neck, a carrot in each fist. Lucas has backed him against the counter. A second later, Eliott drops the carrots to run his fingers through Lucas’ hair.

“Oh, no, Lucille, but what are you doing?” Margot Demaury says, as Lucille sits down beside her. “If you leave those two unattended in there, we’ll never get our salad, and the tagine will boil over.”

There’s a long argument to be made against the unfairness of making Lucille supervise two idiot men who have no shame and who should really know better, but Lucille just smiles and says, “They’ll get hungry eventually.”

A key in the lock announces M. Demaury’s return. He’s about to argue a complicated patent case before the European Commission and has been working all hours, every day of the week. He comes in sighing, mopping at his forehead, complaining about the weather.

“It blows hot and cold,” he says. “Freezing one minute, boiling the next, my God, I swear the world is ending.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Paul,” Mme. Demaury says, and, “Look, Lucille’s here.”

“Lucille, my girl!” Paul Demaury beams. His smile is exactly like Eliott’s beneath a crown of salt-and-pepper hair. “How was the first week of class? How does it feel, your last fall semester ever?”

She makes a noncommittal answer. Paul rushes on.

“You have Contracts this year, don’t you, with my friend Mathilde?” He talks like Eliott too, fast and light. “That’s Professor Caron to you, of course. She’s tough on her students. Let me tell you a thing or two about Mathilde…”

They settle down at the table with Paganini still playing softly in the background. Lucas, red-cheeked, tries to shift the collar of his flannel to hide the new mark on his neck. Eliott grins like a wolf. He’s sitting on Lucille’s right, and Mme. Demaury is on her left, and the tagine is delicious, the salad fresh, the conversation fascinating.

Beneath the table, her phone lights up with an email notification: Chloe wants to know if she would like to be study partners this semester.

_Of course_, Lucille replies surreptitiously, and Chloé sends a smiley face, and Lucille eats her dinner and is glad.


	2. Act 1 / October

September dissolves into seafoam, slips right through her fingers.

In early October, she meets Chloé’s friends, in the political science and media tracks. They’re all small, to Lucille’s eyes, little birds, thrushes and sparrows, burbling in their oversized, slope-shouldered sweaters, laughing over their cafés and smoothies. Their fingernails are like river stones, polished, in shades of robin’s egg blue, gray, and teal.

Chloé sits between two other women, Sophie and Rania, her gaze downturned, her eyelashes dark and heavy with mascara, the matte pink of her lipstick feathering against the rim of her cup. She’s thrown her black leather jacket over the back of her chair; underneath, she’s wearing fawn-colored cashmere. Lucille wants to run her hand over it, rub it between her fingers.

She feels gawky in their midst, the molting crow surrounded by wood pigeons. She’s a good head taller than all of them, and her coffee is large, too, poured directly into her Thermos.

“It’s tough being a law student, huh,” Rania says, nodding sympathetically as Lucille takes a big bitter gulp.

“On that note,” Lucille says, pushing back her chair. She has another ten minutes to get herself to Contracts, to lay claim to one of the coveted front row seats. Just as M. Demaury warned, Caron _is _tough, but she never calls on the first row, preferring instead to pick on the slackers in the back. Normally, Lucille doesn’t bother playing this game: she sits where she pleases and answers when called upon. This week, though, she needs cover; she needs to be in Caron’s blind spot. She hasn’t done the reading. She’s been thinking of other things.

Chloé is reapplying her lipstick. She fishes the tube from the silken depths of her bag, holds it carefully between her fingers, and presses the soft pink smudge of color to her mouth, dabbing; her lips are parted, and Lucille can’t look away.

The hubbub of the student center fades into dull humming, then sharpens again as Chloé glances up and meets her eyes.

Lucille jolts; she jams her laptop into her bag and throws her phone after it.

“Off I go,” she says, with a blind smile around the table. Who knows what Sophie and Rania and Emmeline and whatever-her-name-is are doing, what they’re looking at, thinking, saying; Lucille certainly doesn’t.

Chloé smiles. “See you in class,” she says.

But that week Chloé comes down with a cold and skips their seminar. Lucille knows about the cold because Chloé texts her: _I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. What’d I miss?_

_I’ll bring my notes over_, Lucille says. _What’s your address?_

_—Oh no, I wouldn’t want to put you through any trouble._

_—It’s no trouble._

Chloé’s apartment is south of the station at Plaisance. At the edge of campus, people are crowding into the métro. Lucille scowls at the jam and decides to walk.

It’s raining, and a damp chill settles into her bones, numbing the tips of her fingers. Sheltered and shadowed by her black umbrella, Lucille hurries past a flower shop, where late roses are sitting dewily in a bucket on the sidewalk beneath the gushing eaves, defying the season. She contemplates buying something: a single red rose that will telegraph her interest, a sexless autumnal bouquet as a friendly but expensive gesture, or even cold medicine from the pharmacy down the block. Cravenly, she settles on the cold medicine, orange and orange-flavored: innocent, well-intentioned, easy to swallow.

Chloé meets her at the door, opening it slowly, with a clean tissue wrapped around the knob. She’s wearing a sweatshirt and leggings. Her lips are chapped, and her bangs have been pulled back with a black band; without them, her face looks bare and young. The delicate edges of her nostrils are red and swollen.

_Poor little nose_, Lucille thinks. Aloud, she says, “Oof.”

“Oof,” Chloé agrees ruefully. “What shitty weather. You didn’t have to come.”

“Oh, I wasn’t far,” Lucille says. She leans her umbrella against the wall and follows Chloé inside.

Chloé lives in a tiny studio, sparsely decorated and narrower than the Street of the Fishing Cat. Her laptop is balanced atop her microwave, gleaming faintly in the gray light that drifts in through the single window. Lucille tries not to look at her bed: black and white polka-dotted bedsheets, neatly made and piled high with mauve pillows. There’s a little stuffed rabbit in pink corduroy nestled at the center of the mound. On the bedside table is a glass of water, untouched, and a framed picture, the faces indistinct in the gloom.

It’s only large enough for one person, she thinks, and she notes that Chloé has taped pictures of her friends on the walls, and that none of them resembles her memory of Yann. Lucas isn’t there, either, not that he would have any reason to be, but Lucille finds this oddly reassuring.

Chloé has her arms around her friends in every photo, men and women. Lucille remembers a cramped selfie, three years old: the lights were dim in the Demaury apartment, and Eliott was on her arm, sulky. Lucas’ smile was tight and uncomfortable; Chloé was beaming. She tries to recall her own expression and draws a blank.

“What a terrible host I am,” Chloé says, and Lucille startles. Chloé’s flicked on her electric kettle—the light shines blue and sharp in the darkness of the kitchen—and is rummaging through her cabinets on her tiptoes. “Let me make you some tea, at least. Or—help yourself. Maybe I shouldn’t touch anything.”

Lucille joins her by the cabinets. She surveys the teas, all of which have been polluted with some form of bergamot. Deep in the back, she finds a crumpled box of chai and twitches it out into her hands.

“Oh, I forgot I had that,” Chloé says. “It’s nice being…”

“And for you?”

“Oh, I’ll take—yeah, that one,” Chloé says, reaching. Her fingers stop short of Lucille’s forearm as Lucille retrieves a sachet of Earl Grey and vanilla. “Thanks. It’s nice being tall.”

“Mm,” Lucille says. She chooses two mugs, both double-walled glass. “Boys don’t like it.” As soon as the words leave her mouth, she cringes; she winces into the cabinet and wonders why she said that.

“Eliott did,” Chloé says, and then, “…does?”

“Did,” Lucille corrects. “He’s still with Lucas, you know.”

“Really?” Chloé says. Lucille watches her face carefully through the rising steam of the kettle: no ripple, no sign of upset. “That’s longevity.”

“It’s only been three years.”

“You keep in touch?”

_Oh, I have dinner with him every Sunday, his parents are my parents, they’ve practically adopted me_. She imagines saying this and receiving a look of horror, or worse, pity. “Oh, sure,” she says airily. “We’re good friends. Always have been.”

“I thought he’d go back to you, you know,” Chloé says. “I thought he’d be crazy not to.”

Lucille doesn’t know what to say. She experiences a small bubbling of resentment whenever she hears that word. _Crazy_. She tries not to use it carelessly and hates herself when she does. It’s used unfairly, inaccurately, and cruelly. A blanket term that dismisses both Eliott and ex-girlfriends. She swallows back the lecture and says, “Crazy’s a little harsh. We were over a long time ago.”

The kettle clicks. Chloé looks like she wants to keep talking about it, about Eliott. To change the subject, Lucille digs her notes from her bag, holds them in front of her belly like a shield.

“Fuck,” Chloe says, taking the notes, “I love your handwriting. It's so elegant.” She pivots toward her laptop. “I can barely read my own. I have to type everything.”

Lucille empties the kettle into their mugs. The tea stains the water in limpid swirls of red-brown. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches as Chloé puts her hair up, dragging the thick mass of it into a knot at the top of her head. Tendrils escape the hair tie and curl limply at her nape; her neck is white and glimmering, and suddenly Lucille senses the heat radiating from it, from the rest of her.

“Are you still running a fever?” she says. “Girl, you should be in bed.”

Unthinking, she brushes her knuckles against Chloé’s cheek. Warm, warm. Or maybe her own hands are cold. She doesn’t know. Time stretches. Chloé blinks up at her, and she pulls away.

“You feel a little warm,” she manages.

“I’ll go to bed early,” Chloé says. She says it earnestly, like a promise.

Lucille’s throat is dry, achingly so, but the tea is still too hot to drink. She leans back against the counter as Chloé opens the clamshell of her laptop. She’s changed her desktop: from a summer field to a dark-haired woman and two dark-haired little girls crowding around an enormous pumpkin. “My nieces,” she says, in answer to Lucille’s raised eyebrows, and then they’re quiet, while Chloé transcribes her notes and the rain pours outside.

“So,” Lucille says eventually, mustering a smile, “are _you_ seeing anyone?”

These are things straight women talk about, she reminds herself. Her voice is smooth, thrumming, engaged. She’s prepared to talk about shoes, too, and makeup, if she has to.

“Me?” Chloé looks up from her typing. She sniffles. “Me, no. Not since lycée. There just isn’t enough time.”

“Oh,” Lucille says. Chloé’s turned back to her laptop, dabbing at her nose with a tissue, but Lucille keeps her face blank anyway. “Sure. It’s hectic.”

“I still want to date, though,” Chloé says. She looks up again, sighing, gazing through the window at the rain-blurred streets of Paris. “Even though school’s so fucking busy. Fuck, I want flowers, I want a kiss in the rain.”

Laughing, Lucille says, “What a romantic! Stay out of the rain for now and rest up. I’m sure a guy will come along soon enough to sweep you off your feet.”

There’s a pause. Chloé glances at her. “Not necessarily a guy,” she says. “You know?”

Lucille sips her tea and nods and doesn’t remember how she gets herself home.

“You okay, L.D.?” Claudine says. “If you stare any harder at that page, it’s going to catch fire.”

“What?” Lucille says, looking up from her textbook on the European Convention.

“I said, are you okay? Damn, girl,” Claudine says. “What happened?”

“I think I’m coming down with something,” Lucille says. She touches her own forehead, her cheeks. Warm, warm. Her heart pounds.

“I’ve never seen you like that,” Eliott says, on the last Sunday of October. They’re in the kitchen again, peeling potatoes this time to accompany M. Demaury’s famous steaks.

He’d dropped by the Sunday before with a pot of stew, on his mother’s orders, after Lucille had called to tell Mme. Demaury she wouldn’t be able to make it to dinner. Lucille met him at the door heaped in blankets. She’d forgotten to give the medicine to Chloé, but it was just as well: she took it herself and lapsed into a coma, and the banging of Eliott’s fist on the door had been exceedingly unwelcome.

She’d clutched at the doorframe and shivered and wheezed out, “What?”

He’d made her go back inside and lie down. _At once,_ he’d said, and, _Fuck, you look dead on your feet._

She’s feeling much better now, with a slight lingering cough. There’s a Halloween party tomorrow on campus, and she’s going to go in costume as a fencer. Chloé won’t be there: she’s spending Toussaints at her grandmother’s in Thiais.

_I’ll bring you something from IKEA_, Chloé said. She texted Lucille from the train. By that point, Lucille had managed to move from her bed to her couch, nursing a bowl of leftover stew as she watched a movie on Netflix.

_—You know there’s one in the city now too, don’t you?_

_—Shh, the one in Thiais is way better. It’s huge. I got lost there one summer as a kid. _

_—Poor you!_

_—I slept quite comfortably in a bunk bed until my grandmother found me. _

_Bottom or top? _Lucille had asked. “Fuck,” she’d said to herself, turning red.

_Top. _Chloé had replied immediately, and Lucille knew it was because the innuendo had sailed right over her head. She buried her own head in a couch cushion, groaning.

_How about it? _Chloé said. _I’ll get you a Bladet. An Idgrund. A Jansjö. A Laukvik._

_—You’re making those up._

“Seriously, you looked fucking haggard,” Eliott says.

“Thanks,” she says.

“Was it swine flu or something?”

“What are you supposed to be, idiot,” Lucille says, nudging him, “the Count of Monte Cristo?”

Eliott’s been prancing around in a long red cape all afternoon, swishing left and right and getting underfoot.

“A vampire,” Eliott says. He opens his mouth and points at his very normal canines. “I haven’t put the teeth in yet. Obviously.”

“And what is Lucas going to be?” Lucille asks, long-suffering.

Eliott grins. “A tomato.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s cute,” Eliott says, blithely, as though he hasn’t heard her. Maybe he hasn’t. “He has a little green hat. For the leaves.”

“And I suppose you plan to suck him dry,” Lucille mutters.

He hears _that_. “Lu_cille_,” he says, pretending to be scandalized; he clutches at the thin golden chain connecting the edges of his cape. She notes, however, that he doesn’t deny it. M. Demaury arrives home and chases them from the kitchen.

At the Halloween party, she kisses a black-haired witch, Amina or Amira, it’s hard to hear over the music. Her mouth is warm and sticky with rum, and she covers it when she laughs, hiding both her lips and her dimple.

As pleasant as it is to be backed into a corner and kissed breathless, to have someone else’s hands on her body, there’s something strange about it, Lucille thinks, a pervasive, strobing wrongness. She goes home alone. It takes her until the next morning, awakening with throbbing temples in the bright sunshine of All Saint’s Day, moaning at the cacophony of Claudine playing Charly Fiasco at top volume in the kitchen while frying eggs, to realize that Amina-Amira was perfectly lovely, perfectly sweet, and just a little bit too tall.


	3. Intermission / November

November brings the demise of her stepmother, who leaves in a huff one night, taking only her dog and a single suitcase, and the arrival of a new woman in her father’s life: the ethereally pale, blonde-haired Sandrine, who was, Lucille gathers, a temporary receptionist of some sort at his agency. At this point she wonders—aloud, to Sandrine’s face, which flickers along with the candles on the table—whether she ought to bother learning their names.

“If you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head, I’ll have to ask you to leave,” her father says.

“That suits me just fine,” Lucille says. “I’m tired of this, I’m tired of you. What was wrong with Anouk? Did she develop a wrinkle? A personality?” To Sandrine, she says, sweetly, “A pleasure to meet you, however brief your tenure.”

She finds Eliott at a bar the next arrondissement over and pounds shots while he looks on sympathetically, nursing his beer.

“Should you be having that?” she says.

Eliott says, “Ah, but Lucille, we’re here to talk about your problems, not mine.”

“Fair enough,” she says. She waves the bartender over. “One more, if you please.”

“Good sir,” Eliott adds, which bizarrely gets him a grin from the bartender, a man with a nice jaw and several piercings in both earlobes. Lucille rolls her eyes. As far as she can tell, Lucas is having a boys’ night out with his lycée friends, and Eliott seems calm enough, if tipsy. But perhaps they’ve argued. If they have, she’s sure it’s trivial. They’ll be in each other’s arms by the end of the night, blubbering out apologies. Another point of envy: when she and Eliott argued, they’d stay cold for weeks; any apologies, from either side, were grudging.

Eliott turns back to her. “You know, I think they’d get along, your father and Lucas’ father,” he says.

“Why?” Lucille says. “Do they have the same taste for blondes?” She’s found all her father’s subsequent wives and girlfriends attractive, a fact that used to worry her and that she now finds merely irritating.

Eliott considers. “Lucas’ mother is a sort of blonde,” he concedes. “But no, I meant that they’re both assholes.”

“And I’m the daughter of an asshole,” Lucille says. She said much more to Sandrine in parting, things about wishing her happiness with someone her own age. _What’s so great about this geriatric bastard? _She told her father he could always buy Anouk a new set of tits, if that’s what had come between them. Her father drags out all the worst parts of her, she thinks, dredges up every last bit of internalized misogyny from the marshes of her soul and piles them hot and foul and steaming on the shore.

And goodbye to _Lulu_, she thinks. It rolled out the door with Anouk and her suitcase and her improbably tiny terrier, and she’s plain _Lucille_ again.

“Lucas can be pretty snippy when he wants to, too,” Eliott says. “You’re not alone there either.”

“Will you please stop comparing me to Lucas,” Lucille says tightly.

There’s a pause where Eliott swirls his beer around, holding the bottle by the neck with glistening fingers. “Sorry,” he says. “I just want you to feel better about it. About yourself. It’s about time you told him off.”

“I tell him off once a year, and nothing ever seems to change.” She drinks her fourth shot and sniffs. “I miss my mother. I wish she’d call. I wish she’d send me a fucking email.”

“Oh, Lucille. Come here.” He slings his arm around her shoulders, and she leans into him and smells him, familiar and unfamiliar all at once, and closes her eyes.

She wakes up on the Demaury couch on Sunday morning to the sound of the radio and soft sizzling: in the kitchen, Margot Demaury is making chocolate crepes. Lucas stops by thirty minutes later, with flowers. At breakfast, Lucille and Eliott are both red-eyed: Lucille hungover, Eliott smiling and faintly teary. Under the table, he and Lucas grip each other's hands. Lucille cradles her phone. M. Demaury enters, whistling, and puts the flowers in a vase.

When she was thirteen, one of her father's girlfriends took her out to drink in the middle of the day. She was beautiful in Lucille's eyes, impeccably made up, a sylph or siren as translucent as Sandrine is now translucent—though whether this was due to sheer blondness or Lucille's fading memory of her, Lucille doesn't know. Her name was Marly, which Lucille thought was unusual, and she came from Alsace, and she was some kind of saleswoman of electric car components, which Lucille also thought was unusual and admired. She spun a story for Lucille's administrators, a doctor's appointment, and off they went into the chilly April sunshine, to a bistro in the third arrondissement, where Marly ordered wine.

The waiter brought the bottle over and poured for them both without question. Lucille imagines they must have looked like first year university students: Marly, blonde and cute, and Lucille, tall for her age, with dark brows and a face that looked cold and mature at rest.

“I'm leaving your father,” Marly had said, and Lucille had nodded, coldly, maturely, as though she had been expecting it. Inside, she was spinning. It really was like having a rug pulled out from under her, she thought; it was as though everything in the bistro, her glass, her chair, her bottom, had tilted sideways, and she was still falling.

Her father had brought women home before, women of whom Lucille had only caught glimpses in the mornings, as she brushed her teeth: bare arms and shoulders in her father's bed, awake and rueful or awake and grinning, winking at her in the kitchen, the bathroom. Sometimes they would leave at the same time, through the same door, wait at the same bus stop—silently, because after all they were strangers. Marly had been one of the winkers, and she had returned at dinner time with a present, a model car from her job. And she had stayed four years, and she was no longer a stranger.

“You don't seem too surprised,” Marly said.

“He's a shit,” Lucille said. At thirteen, she still felt a nervous thrill about saying such things. Later, she would have worse things to say about her father, and she would feel very little saying them, insults falling from her lips as dull as cow pats.

“Well, neither party is exactly blameless, in this case,” Marly said. “Oh, Lucille, I will miss you, though.”

Lucille had sipped her wine, rolling it around on her tongue, hating it and pretending to savor it. “Are you leaving?”

“I just said,” Marly began, and then, “Oh, yes. I'm going back to Alsace. It's just not for me, Paris.”

“Are you going to start your vineyard?” As a child, Marly had had a dream about owning her own vineyard—a literal dream, of white linen blowing on a clothesline over a valley of grapes. She'd told Lucille about it in great detail, numerous times, usually when the weather in Paris was bad.

Marly had smiled. “We'll see,” she said. In the end, she had: a case of wine had arrived, carefully packaged, two Christmases later, addressed to Lucille, and that was how Lucille learned that Marly had had another man on the side all along, the scion of an old wine family in Colmar.

“You can call me whenever you want, Lucille,” Marly had said, and unexpectedly her blue eyes had brimmed over, releasing butterflies in Lucille's wine-bewildered stomach, “text me if you don't want to call, come visit any time, okay?”

But Lucille never did. Her father began his rotation again; he had never really stopped, not even after he'd put a diamond on Marly's finger. The diamond left with Marly. Just days later, a new family moved in next door. The husband was tawny-haired and handsome, the wife equally leonine, with striking gray eyes and a charming smile. Her father had scoffed at them, the fancy Paris lawyers. Lucille had introduced herself to their son.

“Eliott,” he'd said, thin and girlish and adorable, “I'm Eliott.” When Lucille turned sixteen, they drank a bottle of Marly's wine and went to bed together, and it was Lucille's turn to dream of Alsace, and she woke up in Eliott's arms, in Eliott's bed, with the bottle toppled over on the rug and Eliott's hair tickling her chin and a vision of a blue sky over endless green hills. And Marly, in a white dress and a straw hat, turning to her, waving.

In November of 2022, she tries Marly's number on her smartphone, but it's been disconnected.

Later, with Claudine and more wine—boxed, from Provence, purchased as a dare by one of Claudine's friends—Lucille looks Sandrine up on Google and finds her, a doctoral student of ethnomusicology at the Sorbonne. She graduated university the same year that Lucille started lycée, so she's not as young as Lucille thought.

“Who is she?” Claudine asks, whistling. “Someone you matched with on Tinder?”

“No,” Lucille says. “Possible Stepmother Number Five.”

“Fuck,” Claudine says. “Your dad gets around. Mm, Sandrine, Sandrine. I bet she goes by Sandy. She looks like she'd be a Sandy.”

Claudine goes into the kitchen in search of better wine. Lucille finds her phone and thumbs through her notifications. She sees suddenly that Chloé's tagged her in a picture of an enormous cappuccino._ #StudyHard, #Claquéeeeee. _The boxed wine hits her all at once, flooding her like lava. She likes the picture.

From the kitchen, Claudine calls, “Maybe I should go by Claude, what do you think, L.D.?”

Over time, Lucille has come to realize that she dislikes her own name: it feels prissy, overly feminine. In her rages she feels more like a Scylla than a Lucy, and in fact, she remembers, Eliott has called her Scylla before, bitingly, in a tone meant to wound. She'd laughed in his face. They hadn't spoken for a month.

“Sure, why not?” she says. She scrolls through Chloé’s posts again. A year ago, there were pictures of a boy beneath yellow November leaves, grinning in front of early Christmas displays: _#DateNight #avenuemontaigne_. He looked nice enough, if a little juvenile, wearing his cap backwards. She refrained from opening his profile. Now there are artistic street scenes, pictures of pigeons, breakfasts, a selfie taken with a niece under each arm: three matching, beaming, dimpled smiles. Like, like, like.

Chloé is a cute name. A sweet open sound that ends with a little lift, like a question. _Chloé?_ And the answer can only be, _Yes_.

Claudine returns clinking a pair of cider bottles together, and Lucille closes Instagram—quickly but not quickly enough.

“Ooh, who’s that?” Claudine says.

“Nothing, no one,” Lucille says. “Just a classmate.”

“Oh, yeah?” Claudine says. “She’s cute. Is she…”

“I don’t think so,” Lucille says, even as her stomach swoops. _Not necessarily a guy,_ she thinks, and, _I should have brought her a rose._

“Boo,” Claudine says. “Are you sure? Invite her out with us sometime.”

Lucille smiles and shakes her head. Claudine and her friends spend their evenings at a lesbian bar by Buttes Chaumont Park, Rosa Bonheur, where they smoke a lot and talk about the meaning of life. Lucille tags along occasionally, but she feels like a lone barnacle clinging to the side of a smooth-hulled ship: out of place and about to slip. Claudine’s on her side, of course, but many of Claudine’s friends look at her like an oddity.

_I don’t date bisexuals. _

_Way too messy. _

_No offense._

“None taken,” Lucille had replied, and she’d fastened the comment beneath the lid of her Pandora's box along with all the others. She pulls them out one by one later, in the safety of the Demaury living room on Sunday night, her belly full of bread and soup, her guts aching with cramps; she lies on the couch and Eliott on the carpet, and they take turns ranting about the unfairness of it all, the heaviness of expectations and of performance.

It's raining again, with the rain freezing into sleet every five minutes. Mme. Demaury has already offered to let Lucille stay the night, though Eliott is planning to brave the elements; no weather is too daunting to keep him from his Lucas. Lucille fondles the velvet of the couch and changes the topic, saying, “In any case, Sorbonne or no Sorbonne, I question the intelligence of any woman who takes up with my father.”

“You should also question her eyesight,” Eliott says snidely, and Lucille has to hit him with a pillow, because they both know she takes after her father, M. Roland Desruelles; she has the same dark brow.

“Or the intelligence of any woman who takes up with any man,” Lucille continues, catching the pillow as Eliott throws it back at her. “Why do it at all?”

_It’s 2022_, Claudine’s friend Leah said, waving her beer at Lucille across a table outside Rosa Bonheur. _You can give yourself permission to stop liking men. Really. _She'd grinned like she was sharing a secret. 

“I can't tell who you're insulting anymore,” Eliott says. “Me, your father, yourself...”

“It's all blending together,” Lucille agrees. A miasma of hatred and self-hatred. Eliott sits up. “Are you going?”

“Lucas is texting me,” Eliott says. “He's getting worried.”

“It's Paris, not Mont Blanc,” Lucille says. “You're crossing the Seine. Not a couloir.”

“It's sweet of him to worry,” Eliott says. He's smiling at his screen, utterly and openly besotted. “I'll see you next week. I think we're roasting a goose.”

“Yum.”

Perhaps it’s the lateness of the hour, or the bleak rush of cold air that blew in when Eliott darted out, shrugging on his coat without so much as a goodbye, or the familiar creak of the floorboards beneath Lucille’s socks, which brings sudden tears to her eyes, or the memory of Marly, or all of those things, all at once—but Lucille’s voice wobbles as she says goodnight to Mme. Demaury, who is sitting up in bed with a novel. M. Demaury is in Brussels.

She remembers the days and weeks after Eliott’s diagnosis, how Mme. Demaury had resigned her position at her firm and left the practice of law altogether, spending the spring of the following year navigating a brave new world of psychiatrists and outpatient facilities. She’s part-time now at what used to be the Perray-Vaucluse Hospital, supporting the risk management team. She took night classes, obtained a certification, and made the transition smoothly enough, without complaint, but Lucille still wonders what it must be like, to have gone from a corner office to a cubicle, from filing her own cases to a filling a filing cabinet.

All of this comes to mind again as she looks at Margot Demaury, serene in the glow of the lamp, turning the pages of _En l'absence des hommes_.

“Sleep tight,” Mme. Demaury says.

The scent that envelops Lucille when she flops down in Eliott’s bed is clean and neutral: laundry detergent, nothing more. The Demaurys have converted Eliott’s bedroom into a guest room, and Eliott’s starry duvet has been replaced by lustrous gray bedding and a dark red quilt. Even the mattress is new. Lucille lies on her side and thinks about all the afternoons spent in this room, laughing, studying, fucking, arguing. All of it folded away.

Her phone lights up. Blearily, she pulls it toward her and swipes to unlock.

_—Are you just going to like all of my pictures without saying anything? _

Lucille turns her phone over, turns herself over, goes to sleep.


	4. Act 2 / December

Lucille’s mother lives outside Paris, in Issy, with her husband of ten years, Poghos, and two cats, Gadou and Tsoler. In a past life, she was a reporter for an obscure France TV station, delivering daily updates with padded shoulders and feathered blonde hair. She works in the cutting room now and is, Lucille believes, sixty or sixty-one: she had Lucille late.

The names of the cats Lucille knows from the author blurb on the back flap of her mother’s book; the name of the husband, she knows from the book itself. It’s part popular history, part memoir, the story of the Issy Ghazarians, whose sons fought and died in the Great War, and of Poghos Ghazarian, grocer, synth player, and the love of Alice (née Brodeur) Desruelles’ life. The book is dedicated to Anahit Ghazarian, Poghos’ mother, and to Manette Brodeur, Alice's paternal grandmother. It does not dwell on Lucille’s father, described in the prologue as the philandering R., and it does not mention Lucille at all.

It puzzles Lucille sometimes, this dissonance, this book wherein her mother flings wide one door to the past while bracing against another with all her might. The divorce was amicable, and her mother was always available for phone calls. She and Lucille’s father, the hated R., had made the decision to keep Lucille in Paris, to minimize the disruption to her schooling. She made the decision to keep Lucille out of her book for similar reasons, though once Lucille asked her, caustically, whose life she was really trying to avoid disrupting.

“Lucille,” her mother had sighed. “I don’t have the energy for this right now.”

Neither her mother nor her father have had any other children, adopted, fostered, illegitimate, or otherwise. Lucille wonders about this; she wonders whether she was enough, or too much, or both. She doesn’t think it could have taken that much energy to raise her, but how is she to know? She calls her mother once a year between Armistice Day and Christmas, and Alice Brodeur-Ghazarian is always tired. Twenty minutes of conversation is all she ever seems able to manage for her only daughter, and the effort is Herculean, painful to witness.

She’s about to dial Alice right now to get it over with, pacing back and forth in the rime of old snow on the sidewalk before Anticafé, when she hears her name and rapid crunching footsteps.

“Hi,” Chloé says, beaming, and she squeezes Lucille’s arms with her little black-gloved hands as they kiss each other’s cheeks. “I’m early, I know. I didn’t think Anticafé was your kind of style.”

“Unlimited coffee,” Lucille says, shrugging, and Chloé laughs into her scarf: fringed, black, knit in a pattern that resembles the drupelets of rows and rows of late summer blackberries, ripe to bursting. For a moment her face and hair are wreathed in a halo of vapor, which dissipates before Lucille can finish imagining what it would be like to lean forward and breathe it all greedily in. “The Wi-Fi in my apartment is terrible.”

The day after the storm in November, she woke to layers of ice deposited on the streets of Paris, encasing the trees outside the Demaury apartment in shining glass, and to a deluge of Instagram notifications: Chloé had liked each and every one of her posts in rapid succession—an easy enough task, considering the infrequency of posts, but she noticed with a thump in her chest that Chloé had left the pictures of Eliott alone.

_There_, Chloé had said. _Now we’re even._

Smiling over a croissant and stunningly strong cup of coffee—Mme. Demaury’s brews are, simply put, magical—Lucille had replied, _Don’t you have better things to do? Exams are coming._

Which is how they’ve wound up here together, at Anticafé, on the sixth of December. Lucille slides her phone back into her pocket and follows Chloé inside. They each pay their five euros, and Lucille collects her first cappuccino. Chloé assembles a plate of chocolate-covered shortbread biscuits.

“I’m so nervous about this class,” she says, plopping down beside Lucille at a free table near the counter. “I’ve never had an oral exam before.” She gnaws at the corner of a biscuit and shivers. The temperature is below freezing today, but she’s wearing tights; Lucille can see the pink of her knees glowing through the black weft. Her boots are calf-high, suede, heeled, and darker at the tips from melting slush. Lucille watches her cross her ankles, then tears her eyes away.

Her phone buzzes. _Psst! Lucille!_

It’s Eliott. She isn’t sure why he’s messaging as though he’s whispering to her in the dark.

_Look up,_ Eliott says, and Lucille stiffens as she sees him outside, pressed up against the glass. He’s wearing black gloves, too, like the paws of a raccoon protruding from the tawny brown of his coat.

_—Come outside. I have to talk to you. Emergency!_

She excuses herself and hurries outside again. Her heart is pounding. She wonders if something has happened to M. Demaury, due back this morning from Brussels. But Eliott was grinning, she reminds herself; he made a ridiculous face against the window. He’s rummaging around in his pockets now; as she reaches him, he straightens up triumphantly with a pair of tickets fanned out in one glove.

“Fuck, Eliott,” she complains. “I thought you said it was an emergency.”

“It _is_,” Eliott says. “What are you doing on Friday?”

“That depends on what you’re about to say.”

“You like Mozart, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Are you seeing anyone right now?”

“_What_?”

His voice is thin and excited. She looks at him carefully, at the shadows under his eyes, trying to read every twitch of his face and fingers. He presses the tickets at her, but it isn’t until he says, “My mother wanted me to give these to you,” that she relents and takes them.

They’re creased from their journey in his pocket. She smooths them out. December 9, _Così fan tutte_, Palais Garnier, 19h30. A private box. She looks at Eliott and raises her eyebrows.

“Can you make it?” Eliott says. “Please say you can. I, um, I might have told my mother you said yes already. Last week.”

“Eliott—”

“Look, there are two. One for you, one for a friend.” He grins.

“Aren’t you going?”

“Fuck no. You remember last year? _The Magic Flute _? I barely made it through. I’d die of boredom, and then Lucas would die of grief.”

“Philistine. And to think you were so into Hyacinthus in lycée.”

“That was before I saw it performed.”

She glances over her shoulder. Chloé hasn’t moved; her fingers hesitate over the plate of biscuits and then withdraw. When she turns back, Eliott is looking at her with narrowed eyes. “You’re in an awful hurry to go back inside,” he says.

“It’s cold as hell.”

“Bullshit. You’re barely shivering.” He squints into the café, gaze roving until it lands on her bag, hanging over the back of her empty chair. “That’s not Claudette,” he says slowly.

“Who?”

“Your roommate.”

“Claud_ine_,” she says. “Claude.”

“Whatever. No, Claude has shorter hair. Holy fuck, Lucille, are you on a date right now?”

Chloé’s back is to the window, thank God. She’s entirely anonymous in her dark sweater and skirt: one of any of the thousands of students at Paris II. Lucille rolls her eyes so vehemently that she experiences a moment of vertigo. “No, for pity’s sake, it’s the end of the semester. We’re studying. Would I bring a date to _Anticafé_?”

“I don’t know what you would do, Lucille, you’re mysterious sometimes,” Eliott says. He taps the tickets drooping from her fist. “In any case, invite her,” he says, “whoever she is. So you can bring your date to the opera.”

“With your parents.”

“Pretend they’re _your_ parents. They practically are.” He sobers. “Do you want to do that? I’ll tell them to play along.”

“And what will _you_ be doing on Friday?”

“It’s our anniversary,” he says.

“It is not.”

“It is,” Eliott insists. “It’s the anniversary of the first time Lucas and I…” And he makes an obscene gesture with several of his fingers that dissolves into a gleeful wave of farewell as Lucille gapes at him. He skips away, slipping a bit through the snow in his canvas sneakers. Lucille goes back inside shaking her head.

“Everything okay?” Chloé says.

Lucille takes a sip of her coffee before answering. It’s gone cold; clumps of cinnamon have sunk into the foam. She swallows and fans the tickets out on the table. She smiles.

“Are you free on Friday night?”

It may be her imagination, or a trick of the light, which is soft and rosy through the red lampshades at Anticafé, but Chloé seems to blush before she nods.

Who knew, Lucille thinks, who knew it would be as simple as that, that all she had to do was ask?

She’s met Chloé a dozen times before, but every previous instance has involved plausible deniability. She chose each backdrop carefully: libraries, cafés, classrooms, staid academic settings where she could brush off every brush of their elbows. There’s nothing she can brush off now, she thinks, not now, when she’s gone back to her father's apartment to borrow the crystal earrings Anouk forgot in the back of a drawer, to sit at Anouk’s vanity and blend smoky gray shadow over her eyelids. She imagines Chloé doing the same, smoothing down her bangs, dabbing at her parted lips with deep, pomegranate red, and swallows.

Sandrine is nowhere to be seen. Her father is in the living room. They don’t speak. Lucille goes home, chooses the same black dress she wears to every fancy occasion, decides not to style her hair, and arrives at Palais Garnier at exactly a quarter past seven.

Chloé is waiting for her on the steps. Her little black pumps have pearls sewn over the toes; they glimmer as she shifts from side to side. A line of satiny blue peeps out from beneath her coat, matching the clutch she’s massaging absently with red, bare fingertips. Lucille kisses her cold cheeks and inhales attar of roses.

“Why are you waiting here, girl?” she scolds. “Get inside!”

“It’s crowded in there,” Chloé says. “I didn’t want to miss you.” Beneath the yellow globe of a lamp and the unfurled stone wing of the muse of poetry, Chloé pauses and says, “You look gorgeous. You always do, of course. But tonight especially. I mean—what I mean is—you’ll have to show me how to get that smoky eye.”

“It’s a little dramatic for daytime wear,” Lucille says, after a strangled silence. “Thanks for coming.”

Chloé’s lips are bare. They part in a smile. "Thank you for inviting me," she says, and then she looks away.

They exchange their coats for tickets and continue toward the grand staircase. It’s like stepping into a box of jewels. A rainbow of color arches above them as lights illuminate the ceilings, which are painted with images of winged horses and gods. Chloé raises her hands to her mouth, turning in a slow circle. Her eyes are wide, reflecting the gold of the torchères. “It’s beautiful,” she says, “beautiful!”

“You’ve never been?” Lucille says. She remembers the first time she came to Palais Garnier, almost sweating with nervousness. The paintings overhead had dissolved into a blur of pastels; her feet were numb in their shoes over the marble, and the shoes pinched; Chagall’s ceiling in the auditorium was a smear of sickly neon, swirling around like the anxiety in her stomach. Eliott had put his arm around her and squeezed and murmured, “Lucy, relax, you know my parents love you.”

“No,” Chloé says. “I’m uncultured. Do you mind if I…”

“Go ahead,” Lucille says, and Chloé beams and darts up the stairs. When she reaches the top, she pulls out her phone and points it up, craning her neck. The blue dress has a conservative neckline and a deep, plunging back. Lucille watches the slide of Chloé’s dark hair between her shoulder blades and bites her lip.

“Lucille!”

Eliott is hurrying toward her, taking the marble steps two at a time, looking thin and angular and somewhat diabolical in a slim-cut black suit and polished dress shoes. The suit jacket and trousers are neatly pressed, but Eliott’s hair is as wild as ever. He grabs at the bannister and skids to a stop in front of her.

“There you are,” he says breathlessly. “Is your phone dead?”

It’s a time warp, Lucille thinks; it’s a joke.

“What are you doing here?” she hisses.

“Maman’s hospital gala is tonight,” Eliott says. He makes a face. “She forgot. She has to go, the donors…and Papa, too…anyway, they didn’t want to waste the tickets, so…”

“So your anniversary plans were cancelled,” Lucille says.

“Not cancelled, just postponed,” Eliott says. He smiles, and Lucille looks over his shoulder and sees Lucas leaving the coat-check.

“Oh, God, no,” she says. Lucas’ suit is clearly borrowed; the sleeves of the jacket are just a bit too long, and his trousers are cuffed. They come slightly uncuffed as he notices them on the staircase and starts to jog toward them.

Eliott is frowning at her. “What’s your problem?” he says.

“I don’t have—I just—” She takes a deep breath. “I thought your parents were coming. That’s all.”

“Oh, right,” Eliott says. Lucas reaches them and burrows under Eliott’s arm. He lifts his face for a kiss, and Eliott obliges. “The story. Don’t worry. I’ll say _our_ parents had a scheduling conflict. And sent your darling brother here instead.”

"Eliott, seriously…"

“It’ll be a double date,” Eliott continues. “How about it?”

She wants to slap the grin from his face. “That’s not going to work.”

“Why not?” Eliott says.

Lucas looks between them, his usually suspicious glance tinged with uncertainty. “Well, for one, you’d have to be twins,” he says. “Consider the timing, Eliott.”

“Fine, we’ll be twins,” Eliott says. “Fraternal twins exist, _choupi_.”

“Of course,” Lucas says uneasily, “but I don’t know if Lucille wants to…”

Lucille smells roses and feels the soft touch of Chloé’s hand on the back of her arm.

“I’m all done,” Chloé says. “Thanks for waiting. We can…”

"Oho," Eliott says. He’s still grinning, and Lucille knows he hasn’t seen Chloé, only caught a glimpse of her, of a pale elbow or a dark lock of hair. But Lucas’ mouth drops, and his eyes widen.

Lucille looks at her feet, black against the white marble. She isn’t in the opera house anymore; she’s standing in her father's kitchen on a frozen Sunday morning. It’s December, and her mother has returned from a work trip and discovered her father in bed with another woman: the woman has no name and no face in her memory, just a halo of white-blonde hair. There was no scene. Her mother had known. She’d gone to unpack, and the woman had gone away, and Lucille, forgotten, had gone to make herself breakfast. The light was sharp on the kitchen faucet. There was a bowl lying in three pieces on the floor. Lucille had broken it herself, standing on her tiptoes, trying to pull it from the cabinet.

She pivots until Chloé is no longer hidden behind her.

“Eliott, Lucas,” she says. “I think you remember Chloé.”


	5. Curtain

Chloé Farge Jeanson is a first-year student at Paris II, enrolled in media studies. She was raised by her mother and father and grandmother in Thiais, and her older sister still lives there with her children: Céline and the twins, Gabrielle and Thérèse. Chloé has never mentioned a brother-in-law. Her best friends from lycée are named Sara and Ingrid; her best subject in lycée was history. Her favorite color is blue, and she likes cheap beer. She prefers snow to rain and Snow White to Cinderella. She will be nineteen in May. These are the things Lucille knows about her, all the little bits of knowledge she has coveted and collected over the course of the semester.

“Oh,” Chloé says, “Lucas. How are you? How is Yann?” And Lucille learns that the breakup with Yann was not acrimonious, and that Chloé has an excellent poker face.

Lucas does not. He stammers, looks between Chloé and Eliott and Lucille with his hubcap eyes. He has his arm around Eliott, and his fingers are tight in the material of Eliott’s suit jacket, creating creases. She can see him blinking, biting his lip, wondering now whether there was another secret reason Chloé was drawn to him all those years ago. I wonder this too, Lucas, Lucille thinks, and I hate that you know how she kisses, you and your handsome friend Yann, and that you have both known long enough to forget it. And maybe you’re remembering right now, this minute, looking at her, looking at her mouth.

“He’s fine, I’m fine, he’s fine,” Lucas manages eventually, and once this blockage has been overcome, the dam bursts, and he launches himself on a long sputtering story, about Yann and engineering and the gender ratio of his classes.

Eliott swoops in. “So how did this come about?” he says. His voice and eyes are cool, as though he’s uncovered a scheme, as though _he’s _been betrayed, and Lucille brought Chloé along to spite him and ruin _his _evening.

Lucille glares at him. But Chloé says, with a dimpling smile of delight, sailing high above the awkwardness, “We had a seminar together this term. Lucille has been tutoring me.” She squeezes Lucille’s arm, and Lucille realizes with a jolt that she never let go. “I would have failed without her.”

“Oh, please,” Lucille says.

“We should,” Lucas says, stilted. “Our seats. The time.”

Lucille leads the way up the stairs, keeping her gaze fixed on the marble arches ahead. She’s certain Eliott and Lucas are whispering to each other, but she can’t hear them over the rising echo of voices as other audience members find their seats.

The Demaurys’ private box is on the fourth tier, high up to the right of the stage. Lucille isn’t sure of the logistics or the cost of obtaining such privileged seating, but she gathers that a director of the opera company has been a client of Paul Demaury’s firm for more than three decades. Against a wall of sumptuous velvet vermillion, she starts to whisper this to Chloé and then stops, remembering the lie she told four days ago: _My parents bought extra tickets_.

Chloé murmurs, “I see—it’s nice that you’re still so close,” and buries her nose in the program.

_I can explain,_ Lucille says. Chloé’s phone must be silenced or powered off; she makes no move to retrieve it from her clutch. She turns the page. _It’s a long story, but—_

_What the hell, Lucille,_ Eliott says. He’s typing feverishly, thumbs flying. Beside him, Lucas is staring fixedly at his program booklet, dragging his index finger under the same line over and over._ How long has this been going on?_

Lucille doesn’t reply. The ellipses stop and start again. Eliott tries a different tactic. _I thought you liked blondes._

“I’m turning my phone off,” Lucille declares. Lucas startles and grabs at his phone, jabbing at the volume button, but Eliott just looks at her over Lucas’ head and scowls. “You should too, Eliott.”

The lights dim. The curtain rises. Striding left and right before a strange backdrop of nebulas and minimalist props consisting of a single white table and pair of white coffee cups, two men make a wager about the fidelity of their brides-to-be. They’re dressed in futuristic black suits, more science fiction than eighteenth century. The subtitles are projected in yellow, at a slant, and Lucille wonders if the Star Wars styling is intentional. Eventually, the fiancées appear, in luminous white dresses, and sing farewell as the men depart for war. Weeping, they depart the stage, and the last player, the philosopher Don Alfonso, stands alone, chuckling over the faithlessness of all women. _He who builds his hopes on a woman’s heart ploughs the sea._

It’s breathtakingly unfair, Lucille thinks. The real faithless one is sitting beside her, shielded by his accomplice, both of them staring down at the stage with glassy eyes.

Disguises are donned, schemes laid. The men return dressed as aliens and pretend to faint for want of love. When Don Alfonso revives them, they seize the fiancées and hold them tight.

_Give us a kiss_, they demand. _Give us a kiss, or else we’ll die._

The women struggle and duet in outrage, but their pristine white dresses have been exchanged for robes of gray. The symbolism is blatant; their honor is in question. Everyone else on stage—the men, the philosopher, and the maid—turn to the audience and sing of their amusement, their certainty that these empty protests will give way soon enough. The audience applauds. The curtain drops. Lucille bites back a groan.

The lights brighten. Eliott leans over.

“So, Chloé,” he says. “How long have you two been together?” He’s smiling, but it’s a pathetic half-twitch of his lips, and his eyes are watchful.

She hears the squeak of Chloé’s chair as Chloé shifts in her seat. “We’re not together,” she says quickly. Her voice sounds muffled and strange, as though it’s being transmitted through deep water. “We’re just friends.”

“Just friends?” Eliott says. “You were going to introduce her to my parents!”

“Eliott, fuck, come on. Drop it.”

He doesn’t budge. “How long?”

Her mouth is filling with saliva. She swallows and swallows again. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“You don’t see how this is any of my business?” Eliott says. “You going to bed with Lucas’ ex?”

Lucas flushes. “Eliott—hey—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lucille says. She doesn’t dare turn around. Her heart is in her throat; her ears are burning; she must be as red as Lucas. She concentrates on the furious white face before her. “His ex? They were barely even dating! Why are you so upset?”

“I’m not upset,” Eliott hisses. “I’m _concerned_. She was terrible to Lucas. She told everyone that—”

The red is in her eyes now, a bright and deadly mist. “How dare you?” she snaps. Don Alfonso, the bass, booms in her ears: _I laugh at the false outrage of women_. She thinks about her father and his parade of mistresses, of Eliott and his great loves, of the bruises on her heart. She lurches to her feet. “You don’t exactly have the high moral ground here, Eliott. You were cheating on me. Or have you forgotten? And Lucas was terrible _to her_.”

Lucas looks like he wants the box to collapse beneath him and send him plummeting to the ground floor. His eyes are enormous, appealing. “Fuck—Lucille…”

“I just wish you’d _said _something,” Eliott says. “I’m your friend. I’m your _best _friend_. _I think I’m entitled to—”

“You know what I think?” Lucille interrupts. “I think you’re jealous. I think you don’t like it when people steal attention away from you. I think you’re spoiled. I think you’re a hypocrite. I think it’s time you stopped talking.”

Eliott swallows and gets up and stalks away.

“Lucille,” Lucas says softly, and, “shit,” and he hurries after Eliott.

Lucille slumps back in her seat and covers her eyes. She feels the press of Chloé’s hand on her shoulder.

“Hey,” Chloé says.

“Sorry,” Lucille whispers. Her eyes are smarting. “Sorry you had to see that.”

“It’s okay,” Chloé says.

“I thought tonight was going to be different,” Lucille says. “I thought—Margot and Paul are so nice, you would have liked them, they’re nothing like my parents. They’re not like Eliott either,” she says, although she knows that isn’t true, that Eliott has inherited his father’s wild hair and his mother’s clear eyes and their kindness and artistry, “they’re just…they’re the best. I thought we’d have an interesting conversation about Mozart, and the opera wouldn’t be so horrifically sexist, and…”

“Let’s get out of here,” Chloé says.

Lucille sniffs. “What?”

“Let’s go,” Chloé says. “Before they come back. Let’s ditch them. I read the program. It doesn’t get any better. ‘Women are all like that,’” she quotes. “You don’t want to sit through the second half of this, do you?”

“No,” Lucille admits, and when she wipes her eyes and looks up, Chloé is smiling.

“Then let’s go!” she repeats, and Lucille nods.

The cold soothes her sinuses, her tired eyes. She keeps her coat open and lets the night air flow over her as she follows Chloé down the steps and around the corner. They turn onto a side street, and the noise of traffic fades and is replaced by the quiet clicking of Chloé’s heels on the cobblestones.

“I’m sorry,” Lucille says again. “This semester, it’s been stressful. I…”

“Eliott was right, you know,” Chloé says. “I _was _terrible to Lucas. I outed him to all my friends.”

“You were upset.”

Chloé shakes her head. “It was a cruel thing to do. I’m ashamed of myself. He wasn’t ready.”

“He lied to you,” Lucille says. “He used you.”

“Yes,” Chloé says. “But we apologized to each other. When Yann and I started dating, he was happy for us. He didn’t belittle me or question Yann’s motives. Tell me—has Eliott ever apologized to you? For lying to you and using you?”

She stops dead. Chloé turns to her.

“You’re still hung up on him,” Chloé says.

“No,” she says. “No. Fuck. We’re just friends.”

“Best friends,” Chloé says. “And you still let him talk to you like that.” She starts to walk again. Her tone is airy. “It’s fine. It’s great, even. I wish I could be such good friends with my exes. But I like a clean break, me.”

“My father and I,” Lucille says. Chloé turns back. “My father and I aren’t speaking right now. My mother lives in Issy, and we talk once a year. I have had four stepmothers, and the only one who gave a shit about me ran away to Alsace in 2013. I—” her voice is shaking, and she takes a moment to steady it “—I have dinner with Eliott’s parents every Sunday at six. We’ve had dinner—every Sunday—for eight and a half years.”

She’d cried after she’d met with Lucas, the week after the péniche, after she’d known it was over for real. She’d held it together until dinner was served, her mouth trembling, but as soon as M. Demaury began ladling out the portions, the floodgates opened; she’d cried and cried, the tears and snot dripping down her nose into her dish. She’d been a mess. And while M. Demaury had paced and apologized and castigated his absent son, Mme. Demaury had rubbed her back and chafed her hands and told her she’d always have a home with them.

Now she has a key. She has a practicum with M. Demaury’s firm in the spring. She has a spare bedroom, a seat at the table, a sanctuary in the tenth arrondissement.

“They’re my family,” she says.

Chloé’s gleaming under the streetlights—her eyes, her lips, her fingernails, the round black buttons of her coat, the pearls sewn across her shoes—all of her distant and shining. “You could have asked me if I wanted to get coffee,” she says finally.

“We’ve gotten coffee so many times,” Lucille says, falling in beside her.

“You know what I mean,” Chloé says. “Drinks, then.”

“Do you want to get a drink?” Lucille asks, wavering. “Right now? Chloé?”

“No,” Chloé says.

She inhales. “Okay,” she says softly. “Okay.”

But Chloé doesn’t leave. She takes Lucille’s limp hands in her own, and then she leans forward and up. In her heels, she doesn’t have to stretch too far.

Her lips are cold and gentle at the corner of Lucille’s mouth. She gasps and laughs as Lucille grabs her around the waist and hauls her in. Somehow, they end up leaning against the driver’s side window of a parked car, kissing and kissing, her hands on Chloé’s hips, Chloé’s fingers gripping the lapels of her coat. The car is icy, radiating cold into her spine, but Chloé is so soft and warm, pressed so tightly against her, that she thinks she’s going to melt.

She draws back. There’s a wine-red smudge across Chloé’s lower lip: Lucille’s lipstick.

“Chloé,” she murmurs, tender, questioning, and Chloé noses at her and smiles.

“You wanted me to meet your parents,” Chloé says. “I think we’re past drinks.”


	6. A Rare Encore

At the entrance of the station at Miromesnil, Lucille reaches for Chloé’s hand. She doesn’t let go until they arrive at Plaisance, and even then, only for a moment, as they alight from the train. She notes every change of state of their linked hands, which start cold and dry in the frigid December air and start to thaw and sweat under the blasting heat of the métro. When she takes Chloé’s hand again at Plaisance, it’s clammy. Envisioning their palms frozen together in a block of clear blue ice, she interlaces their fingers and watches the curve of Chloé’s cheek as she smiles.

The streetlights are dim along Chloé’s street. Cold radiates from the black iron fences that line the sidewalk. They skirt patches of ice and slush and fall silent when they reach the building, 90 Rue Didot, with its charming snow-white shutters. The entrance is a set of narrow wooden doors jammed between a sushi restaurant and a mini-mart.

By unspoken agreement, she follows Chloé up the six winding flights of stairs.

Some of the décor has changed in the last two months: now there are fairy lights strung along the photo wall and draped above the cabinet. She imagines Chloé balancing on a chair or standing barefoot on the counter as she tapes and arranges them, placing the finishing touch, a London snow globe, proudly atop the microwave.

Chloé kicks off her heels with a sigh. She hangs her coat on a hook on the door, and Lucille follows suit.

“Where do you stay?” Chloé asks, retrieving two beers from the fridge. Lucille smiles to herself as Chloé sets them on the counter: Christmas beers, blue bottled, with flaming meteors about to strike the sleepy snowbound towns on their labels. “Where do you live, if your mother is in Issy and all your stepmothers have evaporated and you dislike your father so much? I know so little about you.”

“I’m near Buttes Chaumont,” Lucille says. “With a roommate. It’s a nice place. Spacious. You’re more than welcome to…”

“Not by the bar, by any chance?” Chloé says. She uncaps each bottle with a quick, practiced flick; bottle caps clatter on the countertop. “Rosa Bonheur? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you there.”

She supposes her expression must be verging on dumbfounded. She accepts a beer and schools her face into a blank but somewhat inquisitive look, tilting her head to the side. The smell of orange zest bursts in her nostrils.

Chloé goes on. “Well, but I’m short,” she says, taking a swig. “Maybe I was hidden by all the Amazons in attendance.”

“I don’t go too often,” Lucille says finally. “It’s not really my scene.”

“I’ve gone to Pride, too,” Chloé says. “I didn’t last year, because I was with Louis, and I didn’t feel like I belonged. But that was the only time I didn’t go. There,” she says, and twinkles a bit at Lucille over the lip of her bottle. “I’ve recited my credentials.”

Lucille’s been to Pride six times, each time with Eliott, each time because he asked her to, because he didn’t want to go alone. In rain and in sweltering heat, with small rainbow flags and, later, an enormous pan flag, turning the sunlight pink and blue and yellow as they spread it between them and clapped and cheered. But then Eliott met Lucas and never asked again. She’s skipped the parade in the years since, joining Claude in the Marais for the afterparties or avoiding the festivities altogether.

“I don’t think I would have seen you,” Lucille says. “It gets so crowded.”

“I don’t think you were looking for me, were you?” Chloé says. She drinks, keeping her eyes locked on Lucille’s. Her gaze is dark and piercing. “But _I_ was looking. Every year, in fact.”

“Chloé,” she says. Her mouth is dry and full of the taste of cloves.

“I know you didn’t spare me a second glance when we met in lycée,” Chloé says. “That’s fine. But I was pretty dazzled. I asked myself the age-old question. _Do I want to kiss her, or do I want to be her_? The answer was _Both_.” She grins. “You know, you were so cool and distant back then. It’s nice to see that you can be flustered.”

“Fuck,” Lucille says. “Come here already.”

From the counter, they move to Chloé’s bed, where Lucille kisses Chloé’s back, drawing Chloé’s dark hair to the side to press her lips against every bump of Chloé’s spine, all the way down to the soft blue edge of her gown, before turning her over. Chloé’s small enough that she hasn’t bothered to wear a bra beneath her dress, and Lucille brushes her thumbs against the hard points of her nipples and follows her fingers with her mouth, leaving wet spots.

Eventually, they kick the corduroy bunny and all of Chloé’s pillows to the floor, and Chloé clambers onto Lucille’s lap and rides three of her fingers, her skirt rucked up around her hips, grinding herself against Lucille’s thumb, so hot and slick and eager that she’s dripping into Lucille’s palm. She comes like that, spasming against Lucille’s hand, panting into Lucille’s shoulder, and then she pushes Lucille down, her dress crushed into a belt of satin around her waist, and probes Lucille open, licking and sucking until Lucille thinks she’s going to scream or see stars.

She doesn’t, and Chloé sits up and feeds her the taste of herself, thick and salty, and kisses her throat and fondles her breasts and fucks her while she gets herself off, her fingers slender but clever, rubbing at the swollen parts of Lucille that make her legs shake and her toes curl.

“God, it feels amazing inside you,” Chloé whispers, “I could do this forever,” and Lucille throws her head back into the mattress and bites out, “Fuck, _fuck_,” and comes so hard she feels winded.

Still throbbing, she gathers herself enough to roll over and help Chloé out of her dress. The zipper always catches, Chloé says, tugging fretfully. Lucille holds the dress taut, and Chloé yanks, and the zipper releases. Lucille pulls the dress over Chloé’s head with a silvery rustle.

Chloé curls into Lucille’s arms and rubs their calves together, the mermaid freed from her tail. Lucille gropes around for a corner of the comforter and drags it over them both like a net.

“You were wrong,” she says sleepily. Chloé’s back is sealed to her front, warm and slightly sticky. She threads her hands under Chloé’s arms and holds her, fingers clasped between Chloé’s breasts.

Chloé reaches up and strokes her knuckles. Just as sleepily, she murmurs, “Hmm?”

“I did spare you a second glance,” Lucille says. “In lycée. A second and a third. I always thought you were cute, Chloé.” She yawns and buries her nose in Chloé’s hair, nuzzling closer, inhaling the scent of shampoo and sex and roses. “The cutest…”

She falls asleep and wakes up alone. There’s a depression in the pillow beside hers; she looks at it and thinks about Chloé asleep in her arms, her hair fanning across the sheets, her thighs glistening.

She finds her dress, a puddle of darkness at the foot of the bed, and steps into it. Half-dressed, she wanders into the bathroom; she emerges and leans against the kitchen counter and stares out the window. Flurries drift past.

Her skull feels as dim and empty as the apartment. She’s still fumbling at her zipper when she hears a key turning in the lock.

The door opens, and Chloé steps briskly inside with snow melting in her hair.

“Good morning,” she says brightly. “Coffee?” And she holds up two white paper cups in cozy red sleeves.

They stand in the kitchen, Chloé in her jeans and Lucille in her shining black dress, drinking their cappuccinos. When it’s time to go, she kisses Chloé in the doorway, long and lingering, until Chloé laughs and pushes her away. _If you don’t go now, you’ll never go._ They make plans to meet again on Monday.

She takes the train home and encounters Claude with one foot over the threshold, on her way to a study session.

“Hey,” Claude says. “Fun night?”

Lucille smiles and shrugs.

“Nice,” Claude says. “You’re popular. Your boytoy’s here.”

“My what?” Lucille says, and Claude nods toward the living room, where a bouquet of roses has been laid across the coffee table, and Eliott is waiting on the couch, elbows on his knees, rubbing his forehead. He jumps to his feet as Lucille comes in.

“Ciao,” Claude says. She shuts the door behind her.

Eliott is looking at her in disbelief, taking in her rumpled dress, her snow-stained flats. “You stayed the night,” he says.

Lucille drops her keys into the dish on the console. “Do you want to try that again?” she says. The roses are full and glistening in the corner of her eye, vividly red and almost offensively large. Taking a page from Lucas’ playbook, she supposes. That’s offensive, too, in its own way.

“Sorry,” Eliott says. “I mean—I mean, I’m sorry. For what I said. Yesterday evening.” He grabs the bouquet. “These are for you.”

“I assumed they were,” Lucille says. “Look, Eliott—”

“Coffee,” Eliott blurts. “Do you want to get some coffee?”

“I’m good,” she says. “Chloé—I had some already.”

“Right,” Eliott says. He fiddles with the bouquet, then sets it back down. “I’ll—I’ll just…” He gulps. “Will we see you tomorrow? At dinner?”

She glances at him, stooped and skinny, gnawing at his fingertips, and relents. “Just give me a minute,” she says. “Stay there,” she adds, as he starts to follow her.

In her room, she shimmies out of the dress and into clean underwear, a black turtleneck, and jeans. Her face in the mirror is pale and tired. The gray shadow and mascara have migrated below her eyes, giving her a haunted, hollow look—a decapitated head, she thinks wryly, floating above a sea of black. But her mouth is tingling under its blurred red lipstick as though Chloé has only just kissed it, Chloé with her bare menthol-balmed lips. She smiles at the head in the mirror and finds a makeup wipe.

When she emerges, tucking her hair under a knitted cap, Eliott is still on the couch, folded over his knees. He looks at her, wide-eyed, and sucks in a long breath.

“I’ll walk you to the station,” Lucille says.

They leave the roses on the coffee table and cut through the park, winding south toward the intersection of Botzaris and Simon Bolivar, their breath puffing out in white clouds, the air jagged against their legs and cheeks.

The open space seems to jog Eliott’s tongue. At the bottom of a gentle slope, shuffling along a wide paved lane that runs parallel to the street, he says, “Lucas told me what you did for him. For us.”

It was a cold morning like this one, Lucille thinks, only the days were lengthening, being pulled into summer like golden taffy. The bitterness welling in her mouth had come from something other than coffee.

“That was good of you,” Eliott says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t behave the same way.”

“Last night?”

“Last night. All the time.” He stops beneath a lamp post, and Lucille stops with him. “But last night especially,” he says. “I should have been supportive. Instead I interrogated you like a police sergeant. Like a bastard.”

“Yeah,” she says.

“About Chloé,” he says. He hesitates. “I only remember the bad things, the awkward things. All the trouble with Lucas…back when…anyway. That’s why I flipped out. But I know that’s no excuse.”

“Yeah.”

“Lucille,” Eliott says, “Lucy, you’re very important to me.”

There’s a lump in her throat suddenly, a tightness that prevents speech. She looks at Eliott, wordless, and waits.

“I know you’re not just sticking around for me,” Eliott says. “I know you love my parents, but…” He swallows and fidgets. “The Sunday dinners, our friendship…I don’t want that to go away. Now that you’ve met someone.”

She forces the lump down. They’ve had knock-down fights before, screaming matches inside and outside. But they’d been tethered to each other then, locked together in violent orbit. Today is different; today is quiet and solemn and frightening: the frozen world sliding deeper into winter, with no guarantee of a thaw.

“It won’t,” she says. “I promise. You’re special. Remember?”

Eliott’s face looks like Lucas’ did on that morning, a little guilty, a little strained. But there’s nothing on Lucille’s tongue right now except clean, cold snow—cool relief and clarity. She finds Eliott’s black-gloved hand and squeezes it and watches the breath steaming away from his nose and mouth as he exhales.

“You never said anything when I was with Sander,” she says.

Eliott bites his lip. “I could tell you weren’t serious about him,” he says. “But you’re serious now—I can tell that too.”

They start to walk again. The edges of the lane are piled with decaying leaves; Eliott kicks at them with his boots.

“Tell Chloé I’m sorry about yesterday, please,” he says. “Or I can, myself. Or don’t mention it, if she hates me.”

“The distrust is mutual, I think,” Lucille says, remembering the dark flash of Chloé’s eyes above her smile. “But that may change. I hope it will.”

Eliott nods. They reach the gate and the corner of Simon Bolivar with its thin, domed bollards and wait for the light to change.

“Answer me honestly,” Lucille says. “Do you keep a second job solely to pay for apology bouquets?”

Eliott throws back his head and laughs: a burst of white fog. She leaves him at the Carrefour Bio near the station. Lucas’ friends are coming over for game night, and he’s picking up ingredients for a rainbow carbonara, his own recipe. She hides her wince and kisses him on both cheeks.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says.

“It’s pot-au-feu,” Eliott says. He hugs her, one-armed, before he goes.

“Dear,” Mme. Demaury says, one Sunday in January, after a feast that began with a fleet of chicken vol-au-vents and ended with brick-sized portions of tiramisu. She and Lucille are still at the table, leaning back, stuffed to the gills, smiling and groaning theatrically at each other. M. Demaury has just finished clearing away the dishes. Eliott and Lucas are in the kitchen, sorting items into the dishwasher; between the orchestral trills of Sheherazade Op. 35 on the radio, Lucille can hear the clattering and the splashing, the low laughter. “Dear,” Mme. Demaury says, “are you seeing anyone? Eliott mentioned…oh, perhaps I wasn’t supposed to say anything!”

“_Maman_,” Eliott protests distantly. “Sorry, Lucy,” he calls. “Sorry!”

“In any case,” Mme. Demaury says, as she and Lucille share a fond eyeroll, “she’s more than welcome. There’s always room at our table. Does she like lamb?”

Chloé’s last exam was on Thursday, and she’s in Thiais until Tuesday afternoon. Lucille checks her phone and sees that Chloé’s spending the evening at some sort of ice festival. She’s texted Lucille a picture herself and her nieces in faux fur hats, all three of them beaming in front of an anatomical heart carved from ice, the individual chambers dyed red and blue. _Ideas for Valentine’s Day_, she’s written. _Enjoy your dinner, my heart._

“I’ll ask her,” Lucille says. Under the table, she sends a kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Fin!_
> 
> Boy howdy, this fic went off the rails. Thanks to everyone who stuck with it! Lots of projection, lots of bizarre Google-fueled tangents about Paris and parents and parental figures. This ended up being more of a study of the Lucille-Eliott relationship than pure Chocille, I feel. Shrug shrug shrug. Whoops!
> 
> I'm resuming my renaissance au-related keyboard smashing now. If Eliott's rainbow carbonara ever makes an appearance on [so are you to my thoughts...](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18822283/chapters/44664283), I'll drop a link here.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you liked, please [reblog](https://hallo-catfish.tumblr.com/post/187312399629/cos%C3%AC-fan-tutte-zetaophiuchi-ryuujitsu-skam)!


End file.
